W here do you think the truck’s headed?” Hollis asked, poolside, from her cozy depression in the edge of the giant Starck futon.
“Not the Bay,” said Bigend, sunken so deeply, beside her, that she couldn’t see him. “Soon we’ll know whether or not it’s Portland. Or Seattle.”
She settled further back, watching a small plane’s lights cross the empty center of the luminous sky. “You don’t think they’d go inland?”
“No,” he said, “I think this is about a port, one with a container facility.”
She raised herself, as well as she could, on her right elbow, trying to see his face. “It’s coming?”
“Perhaps that’s what Bobby’s sudden departure means, and not simply that you scared him off.”
“But you think it’s coming?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“The Hook,” he said. “Remember it? That large Russian helicopter? A helicopter capable of flying hundreds of miles, picking up our container from one vessel and transferring it to another?”
“Yes.”
“There are some interesting possibilities for keeping track of commercial shipping, today. Of a specific vessel, I mean. But I doubt any of them would help us trace our mystery box, because I think it keeps changing vessels. At sea. We’ve heard about the use of that venerable Hook, early on, but you don’t need to go that large to shift a single forty-foot container from one vessel to another. Provided you don’t need to actually fly it too far, that is. Ours is a forty-footer, by the way. All either forty or twenty. Standardization. Containers full of merchandise. Packets full of information. No breakbulk.”
“No what?”
“Breakbulk. Noncontainerized freight. Old-fashioned shipping. Crates, bundles. What shipping used to be. I’ve thought that in terms of information, the most interesting items, for me, usually amount to breakbulk. Traditional human intelligence. Someone knowing something. As opposed to data mining and the rest of it.”
“I don’t know anything about data mining,” she said, “or the rest of it.”
“We’ve been buying into data mining at Blue Ant.”
“Shares in a company?”
“No. I suppose you could say we’re subscribing. Or hoping to. No simple matter.”
“To what?”
“The Swiss have a system known as Onyx, based on Echelon, the system originally developed by the British and the Americans. Onyx, like Echelon, uses software to filter the contents of satellite communication for specific search terms. There are Onyx listening posts at Zimmerwald and Heimenschwand, in Canton Bern, and at Leuk in Canton Valais. I spent a week in Heimenschwand, when I was thirteen. Dada.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dada. My mother was researching a minor Dadaist.”
“The Swiss? The Swiss have that kind of system?”
“Last month,” he said, “the Sunday edition of Blick published a classified Swiss government report based on Onyx intercepts. It described a fax sent from the Egyptian government to their embassy in London, referencing covert CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe. The Swiss government refused to confirm the existence of the report. They did, however, immediately initiate judiciary procedures against the publishers, for having leaked a secret document.”
“You can ‘subscribe’ to something like that?”
“Bankers,” said Bigend, “require good information.”
“And?”
“Blue Ant requires good bankers. And they happen to be Swiss. But we don’t quite have the work-around in place. New search terms have to be approved by an independent commission.”
Her eyes were playing tricks on her. Vast translucent things seemed to be squirming, in the depth of the luminous sky. Tentacles the length of nebulae. She blinked and they were gone. “And?”
“Only two members of that commission, so far, would have reason to be favorably disposed to our bankers’ suggestions. But we’ll see.” She felt him sit up. “Another drink?”
“Not for me.”
“But you see,” he said, “the sheer complication of that sort of intelligence, and of course the innate limitations. Not to mention that we’d have no idea who else might be keeping track of search terms. You, however, with your potential to get closer to Bobby Chombo…” He stood, stretched, adjusted his jacket, and turned, bending to offer her his hand. She took it, letting him help her to her feet. “You’re breakbulk, Hollis.” The smile flashed. “Do you see?”
“I keep trying to tell you. He didn’t like it at all, that Alejandro brought me there. It was an obvious deal-breaker, for Bobby. You may think he’s blown town because his ship’s coming in, but I know how little he liked it that I turned up.”
“First impressions,” he said. “Those can change.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me to just walk in on him again?”
“Leave all that to me. First I have to see where he’s going. In the meantime, work with Philip. See what else Odile and her friends have to show you. It’s no accident that Bobby Chombo overlaps two such apparently different spheres. The important thing is that we’ve had our conversation, reached our agreement. I’m delighted to know we’ll be working together.”
“Thank you,” she said, automatically, then realized that that really was all she could say. “Good night,” she said, then, before the pause had too much of a chance to lengthen.
She left him there, beside the ficus trees in their giant flowerpots.